Juana la Loca

Juana, before the mad

I am so glad I live in a time of modern psychiatric medicine. All throughout royal family trees you see weird family members with weird epithets like "the bewitched", "the crazy", or in this case "the mad." Nowadays, a psychiatrist would just throw a handful of pills at them and who knows how different we would be now. The reason for all of this was to keep power in the family. A great way to do that? Inbreeding! The ancient Egyptians took goddess Isis and her brother/husband Osiris as prime examples. In Europe the relationship was not that close, but many times first cousins married without a word being said. Today inter-familial marriages would garner town names like Cousin-wood for example. Anyhow, mental instability was rampant in royal families. Here is the tale of just that Juana of Castile.   
       Born in 1479 to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, Juana grew up expecting nothing more but to grow up and expand her parent's power and wealth. Her sedate childhood was no indication of the passionate person she would become. She was one of the most educated women of her tine speaking Castilian, Leonese. Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Latin; also, all accounts of her attest to her beauty. Juana was said to have had auburn hair and blue eyes, a trait she share with her sister-queen, Catherine of Aragon, future wife of King Henry VIII.

Phillip the "Handsome(?)"

       Unlike many other royal maidens at the time Juana lucked up. At the age of sixteen Juana was betrothed to Phillip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy. Phillip was the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. The marriage of Phillip to Juana was to unite to lands so they could stand up to growing French power. Phillip's epithet must have been true, at first sight Juana fell madly in love with her husband to-be. The couple begged to married the night they met, both were so fond of each other. They started out in uncommon marital bliss.
      It's just to bad that Phillip didn't only have eyes for Juana. Phillip had many mistress' during his marriage to Juana, including one unfortunate lady-in-waiting who got a haircut straight from the duchess herself due to a little fling with the duke. Juana left the discarded the hair as a friendly reminder on Phillip's pillow. Despite the affairs Juana gave birth to five children in rapid succession. Juana also practiced witchcraft making love spells.
     Even after her marriage to Phillip, Juana kept loyalty to all things Spanish. Unfortunately Queen Isabella died and left Juana Queen of Castile. King Ferdinand did not like this, so he used Juana's mad behavior to try to grab Castile from her. Juana protested, she wanted to be queen. Then came the psychotic breakdown. Phillip died. Juana was pregnant with their sixth child at the time. She embraced the corpse as if it was still living. She accompanied it on the funeral procession, but insisted that they travel at night so no women would be tempted by him. Occasionally, she would even open the coffin and greet the dead body as if he still lived. 

The convent Juana was kept  at
for fifty years.

     Obviously, King Ferdinand milked this for all it was worth-after all countries were worth more than daughters. The king declared Juana insane and locked her inside a chamber in a convent in Tordesilles for the rest of her life.After her father died and her son came to rule he didn't have much mercy on his mother either. Juana died in 1555 at the age of seventy-five, she had been imprisoned for nearly fifty years.
      

The Queen of Misrule

* This is about the sad life of Catherine Howard, who was a lot more like her cousin Anne, than many believed. Please excuse the length I just really like the subject of the wives of Henry VIII.       
           
Catherine Howard's birth date is unknown, there is only one portrait believed to be of her, yet she was queen.She was born to Lord Edmund Howard and Joyce Culpeper. As a granddaughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, Catherine had an aristocratic pedigree, but her father, who was a younger son, was not well-off owing to primogeniture and the large size of his family. As a result, he was often reduced to begging for handouts from his more powerful relatives. In 1531, he was appointed Controller of Calais. He was dismissed from his post in 1539, and died in March of the same year. Catherine was also the niece of Elizabeth Howard, who was the mother of Anne Boleyn. This would make Anne and her first cousins, and later on so much more.

Catherine Howard

          Early in her life,  the orphaned Catherine was sent to live with her step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. At her estate at Lambeth the Duchess had many children of less-fortunate noble under her command. While sending young children to be educated and trained in aristocratic households other than their own was common for centuries among European nobles, supervision at Lambeth was apparently lax. An apparent effect of this was on the deficiency of Catherine's education.
          Her character has often been described as vivacious, beautiful, and buxom, but never scholarly or devout. The casual upbringing in the licentious atmosphere of the Duchess' household led Catherine's music teacher, Henry Mannox, to start a sexual relationship with her around 1536, when she was between the ages of eleven and sixteen. He later gave evidence in the inquiry against her. Mannox and Catherine both confessed during her adultery trial that they had engaged in sexual contact, but not intercourse. Catherine was even quoted as saying, "At the flattering and fair persuasions of Mannox, being but a young girl, I suffered him at sundry times to handle and touch the secret parts of my body which neither became me with honesty to permit nor him to require."

        This adolescent affair came to an end in 1538, when Catherine was pursued by a secretary of the Dowager Duchess' household, Francis Dereham. They became lovers, addressing each other as "husband" and "wife". Dereham also entrusted Catherine with various wifely duties, such as keeping his money when he was away on business. Many of Catherine's roommates among the Dowager Duchess' maids of honour and attendants knew of the relationship, which apparently ended in 1539 when the Dowager Duchess caught wind of the matter. Despite this disapproval, Catherine and Dereham may have parted with intentions to marry upon his return from Ireland, agreeing to a precontract, as it was then known. If indeed they had exchanged vows of their intention to marry before having sexual intercourse, they would have been considered married in the eyes of the Church.

         Catherine's uncle the Duke of Norfolk had found Catherine a place at Court as a lady-in-waiting to King Henry VIII's new bride, German princess, Anne of Cleaves. Being a young and beautiful lady-in-waiting to the king's wife, whom he never displayed interest in, Catherine soon caught the eye of the king.

          The Howard's who were seeking to regain the position they had had when Anne Boleyn was queen, trained Catherine to make sure she became the king's new mistress and later wife.       As the King's interest in Catherine grew, so did their influence. Within months of her arrival at Court, Henry bestowed gifts of land and expensive cloth upon Catherine.

         When Henry had his marriage to Anne of Cleves annulled on 9 July 1540, rumours swirled that Catherine was pregnant with his child. Their quick marriage a mere three weeks after the annulment, reflected Henry's lifelong urgency to secure the Tudor succession by fathering healthy, legitimate sons, especially since he only had one, Edward. Henry, nearing fifty and expanding in girth, showered his young bride with wealth, jewels, and other expensive gifts.  Catherine's motto, "Non autre volonté que la sienne", or, "No other will but his", supposedly reflected her desire to keep Henry, an ailing man three decades her senior, content. At this point in his life, the King weighed around300 pounds, and had a foul-smelling, festering ulcer on his thigh that had to be drained daily.

Possible Portrait of Catherine Howard

         Early in 1541, Catherine embarked upon a romance with Henry's favorite male courtier, Thomas Culpeper, a young man who, according to Dereham's testimony "had succeeded [him] in the Queen's affections", and who Catherine had considered marrying during her time as a maid-of-honour to Anne of Cleves. The couple's meetings were arranged by one of Catherine's older ladies-in-waiting, Lady Rochford, the widow of Catherine's cousin, George Boleyn, the brother of Anne Boleyn.

        Catherine and Henry toured England together in the summer of 1541, and preparations for any signs of pregnancy, which would have led to a coronation, were in place, indicating that the royal couple were sexually active with each other. During this time, however, a crisis began to loom over Catherine. People who had witnessed her indiscretions at Lambeth began to contact her for favours in return for their silence, and many of them were appointed to her household. Most disastrously, Catherine appointed Francis Dereham as her personal secretary, at the urging of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. This miscalculation led to the charges of treason and adultery against her two years after her marriage to the King. Catherine Howard was sentenced to beheading at seven a.m. on February 13.

        The night before her execution, Catherine is believed to have spent many hours practicing how to lay her head upon the block, which had been brought to her at her request. She died with relative composure, but looked pale and terrified and required assistance to climb the scaffold. She made a speech describing her punishment as "worthy and just" and asked for mercy for her family and prayers for her soul. According to popular folklore, her final words were, "I die a Queen, but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper," although this is widely discredited. Catherine was beheaded with a single stroke, and her body was buried in an unmarked grave in the nearby chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, where the bodies of her cousins, Anne and George Boleyn, also lay. Henry did not attend.

Peasant, Hero, Heretic, Saint: Part II

            She arrived at the siege of Orléans on 29 April 1429, but Jean d'Orléans, the acting head of the Orléans ducal family, initially excluded her from war councils and failed to inform her when the army engaged the enemy. This did not prevent her from being present at most councils and battles. The extent of her actual military leadership is a subject of historical debate. Traditional historians conclude that she was a standard bearer whose primary effect was on morale. This type of analysis usually relies on the condemnation trial testimony, where she stated that she preferred her standard to her sword. Recent scholarship that focuses on the nullification trial testimony asserts that the army's commanders esteemed her as a skilled tactician and a successful strategist. Stephen W. Richey's opinion is one example: "She proceeded to lead the army in an astounding series of victories that reversed the tide of the war." In either case, historians agree that the army enjoyed remarkable success during her brief career.

Joan of Arc
ca 1854

       Joan of Arc rejected the cautious strategy that characterized French leadership during previous campaigns. During the five months of siege before her arrival, the defenders of Orléans attempted only one aggressive move and that ended in disaster. On 4 May the French attacked and captured the outlying fortress of Saint Loup, which she followed on 5 May with a march to a second fortress called Saint Jean le Blanc, which was found deserted. The next day she opposed Jean d'Orleans at a war council where she demanded another assault on the enemy. D'Orleans ordered the city gates locked to prevent another battle, but she summoned the townsmen and common soldiers and forced the mayor to unlock a gate. With the aid of only one captain she rode out and captured the fortress of Saint Augustins. That evening she learned she had been excluded from a war council where the leaders had decided to wait for reinforcements before acting again. Disregarding this decision, she insisted on attacking the main English stronghold called "les Tourelles" on 7 May.
             The sudden victory at Orléans led to many proposals for further offensive action. The English expected an attempt to recapture Paris or an attack on Normandy. In the aftermath of the unexpected victory, Joan persuaded Charles VII to grant her co-command of the army with Duke John II of Alençon and gained royal permission for her plan to recapture nearby bridges along the Loire as a prelude to an advance on Rheims and the coronation of Charles VII. This was a bold proposal because Reims was roughly twice as far away as Paris and deep within enemy territory.
     Alençon credited her with saving his life at Jargeau, where she warned him of an imminent artillery attack.
          During the same battle she withstood a blow from a stone cannonball to her helmet as she climbed a scaling ladder.Joan traveled to Compiègne the following April to help defend the city against an English and Burgundian siege. A skirmish on 23 May 1430 led to her capture, when her force attempted to attack the Burgundian's camp at Margny. When she ordered a retreat into the nearby fortifications of Compiègne after the advance of an additional force of 6,000 Burgundians, she assumed the place of honor as the last to leave the field. Burgundians surrounded the rear guard, and she was unhorsed by an archer and initially refused to surrender. She attempted several escapes, on one occasion jumping from her 70 foot tower in Vermandois to the soft earth of a dry moat, after which she was moved to the Burgundian town of Arras. The English government eventually purchased her from Duke Philip of Burgundy.
     The trial for heresy was politically motivated. The Duke of Bedford claimed the throne of France on behalf of his nephew Henry VI. Joan had been responsible for the rival coronation, hence condemning her was an attempt to undermine her king's legitimacy. Legal proceedings commenced on 9 January 1431 at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. The procedure was irregular on a number of points.
        The transcript's most famous exchange is an exercise in subtlety. "Asked if she knew she was in God's grace, she answered: 'If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.'" The question is a scholarly trap. Church doctrine held that no one could be certain of being in God's grace. If she had answered yes, then she would have convicted herself of heresy. If she had answered no, then she would have confessed her own guilt. Notary Boisguillaume later testified that at the moment the court heard this reply, "Those who were interrogating her were stupefied."
        Eyewitnesses described the scene of the execution by burning on 30 May 1431. Tied to a tall pillar at the Vieux-Marché in Rouen, she asked two of the clergy, Fr Martin Ladvenu and Fr Isambart de la Pierre, to hold acrucifix before her. A peasant also constructed a small cross which she put in the front of her dress. After she expired, the English raked back the coals to expose her charred body so that no one could claim she had escaped alive, then burned the body twice more to reduce it to ashes and prevent any collection of relics. They cast her remains into the Seine from the only bridge called Mathilda. The executioner, Geoffroy Therage, later stated that he "...greatly feared to be damned."

        Joan of Arc would later become a saint. Not only does she live on in religion but also in legend. Many movies and books have been written about the peasant that would become a hero and even later a saint that would be known for hundreds of years later.

Peasant, Hero, Heretic, Saint: Part I

             I decided to brake this post up into two because it would be really long otherwise. I hope you enjoy the first half of Peasant, Hero, Heretic, Saint, my post over Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc ca. 1485

               "If anything could have discouraged her, the state of France in 1429 should have." That's what historian Kelly DeVries says about St. Joan of Arc. Joan was born in the Provence of Lorraine around 1412. Many battles had occurred during her childhood and on one occasion her village was even burned. The Hundred's Year War had begun in 1337 over a dispute over the claim to the French throne. Later, at her trial Joan testified that she was about 19 years old and that is where the assumption of the year of her birth comes from. She later testified that she experienced her first vision around 1424 at the age of 12 years, when she was out alone in a field and saw visions of figures she identified as Saint Michael,Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, who told her to drive out the English and bring the Dauphin to Rheims for his coronation. She said she cried when they left, as they were so beautiful. At the age of 16, she asked a family-member, to bring her to nearby Vaucouleurs where she petitioned the garrison commander for permission to visit the royal French court at Chinon.She said she needed to see the dauphin, to tell him her voices said she needed to unite France. She made a remarkable prediction about a military reversal near Orleans that proved her predictions true and set off for Chinon and the dauphin.

                She made the journey through hostile Burgundian territory in male disguise. Upon arriving at the Royal Court she impressed Charles VII during a private conference. During this time Charles's mother-in-lawYolande of Aragon was financing a relief expedition to Orleans. Joan asked for permission to travel with the army and wear the equipment of a knight. She depended on donated items for her armor, horse, sword, banner, and other items utilized by her entourage.Upon her arrival, Joan effectively turned the longstanding Anglo-French conflict into a religious war.But this course of action was not without its risks. Charles' advisers were worried that unless Joan's orthodoxy could be established beyond doubt – that she was not a heretic or a sorceress – Charles' enemies could easily make the claim that his kingdom was a gift from the Devil. To circumvent this possibility, the Dauphin ordered background inquiries and a theological examination at Poitiers to verify her morality. In April 1429, the commission of inquiry "declared her to be of irreproachable life, a good Christian, possessed of the virtues of humility, honesty and simplicity.The theologians at Poitiers did not pass judgment on her divine inspiration; rather, they informed the Dauphin that there was a 'favorable presumption' to be made on the divine nature of her mission. This was enough for Charles, but they put the ball back in his court by stating that he had an obligation to put Joan to the test. 'To doubt or abandon her without suspicion of evil would be to repudiate the Holy Spirit and to become unworthy of God's aid', they declared.The test for the truth of her claims would be the raising of the siege of Orleans.

Where the Broken Heart Still Beats: The Story of Cynthia Ann Parker by Carolyn Meyer

           I received this book for Christmas and read it in TWO days!!! It was wonderful with a new and interesting theme: Native American captive. For those of you who don't know the story of Cynthia Ann she was captured in a raid by 500 Comanche Indians when her entire family was raided and killed. When she was captured she was only nine years old. Cynthia Ann remained with the Comanches for twenty-five years. After years of searching for her a group of Texas Rangers heard that a nearby tribe of Comanches had some American captives. One of those captives happened to be Cynthia Ann Parker, wife to the chief Peta Nocona. The Texas Rangers realized who it was and forcibly took her back to her American family against her will. Once she was "home" she was amid strangers and a strange way of life. She did not remember living in a house and spoke very little English. Upon her recapture her family learned that she had three children two older boys, and a infant daughter, Topsannah. Her oldest son Quanah would become the last Comanche chief. Life for Cynthia Ann with her family was hard. She did not understand why she was there, and not with her husband and sons, she had been allowed to take Topsannah with her. Topsannah thrived with the English, but her mother withered. After Topsannah died of pneumonia in 1864 Cynthia Ann died of a broken heart. The book tells her story in two alternating points of view Cynthia Ann and her young cousin Lucy. The book is one that will make you cry for Cynthia never got to return to her husband and sons.

Anne and William: Not Just "Second-Best"

   Their marriage was and still is filled with controversy. Was it a marriage of  love, or did it only deserve the "second-best bed."

Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway was born in the year 1556, in the small hamlet of Shottery about one mile from the town of Stratford. William Shakespeare was born around April 23, 1564 in Stratford. His father was John Shakespeare, a glove maker, and Mary, daughter of an affluent landowner. The age-difference between the two was an astonishing eight years! There are two ways people think of Anne Hathaway. One, as a 16th century cradle-snatcher and another as women who simply fell in love. Their wedding is also a very different from the norm at the time. Anne was expecting the couples first child at the time of the marriage. Maybe things would have been different if they had been betrothed, but they weren't. Anne was 26 at the time and William only 18, still considered a minor. The couple had to pay 40 pounds to buy a special bond so they could hurry up and be married.From the will of her late father it seems that Anne Hathaway brought a dowry to the marriage. Six months after they were married Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. There is speculation that it was about this time that William might have offended Sir Richard Lucy by poaching a deer on his grounds. What with this, and what with the general misfortunes of the family, William left his young family and Stratford to seek his fortune in London. Acting troupes regularly visited the town of Stratford and this would have been a major form of entertainment. It is likely that William Shakespeare knew Will Kempe and possible that Shakespeare went to London with a troupe of actors when he left Stratford between 1585 and 1592. The rest, as they say, is history.Life continued for Anne with her children and in-laws in Henley Street. She never moved away from Stratford in the whole of her life. William, meanwhile in London, had started to become a success as a poet and was also making his name as an actor and playwright in the theatres of London. He occasionally returned home to see his wife and the family. He still kept an interest in the family businesses. 

William Shakespeare

           By 1592 William was mixing with the elite of the literary and theatrical worlds. But the role of a playwright was still not viewed as a creditable occupation. It could, in fact , be a very dangerous one as plays could be used as vehicles for propaganda. The State understood the power of plays. Therefore, all plays that were to be printed had to be registered, which ensured a form of censorship. Shakespeare never published any of his plays during his lifetime.In 1596 the Shakespeare family continued to prosper. But the good fortune came to an untimely and abrupt end when, in August, their son Hamnet died at the age of just eleven years. There is no documentation which records the cause of Hamnet's death but it is highly likely that he died of the plague, which had wreaked so much devastation in London 6 months before. Hamnet was buried in Stratford. 
        In 1610, with his fortune made and his reputation as the leading English dramatist unchallenged, Shakespeare appears to have retired to Stratford.  Anne had her husband home at last. His business interests took him to back to London on occasion but the majority of his time is spent at home. He would have been able to enjoy life with his family including his daughters and granddaughter, Elizabeth.
          Shakespeare did, however, draft his will in January of 1616. Perhaps he was unwell. There are no records or documented evidence which throws any light as to the health of Shakespeare in 1616. The strain of the scandal surrounding Judith would not have helped. William’s son-in-law, Dr. John Hall, oversees his final days and treatment. And in April 1616 William Shakespeare dies. (The exact date or cause of death is unknown but it seems fitting that he died on April 23rd April, the same approximate date of his birth, on St. George's Day, the patron Saint of England). The funeral of William Shakespeare was on April 25th 1616  when he was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Anne, of course, would have been the chief mourner supported by the family of William Shakespeare.The only mention that Shakespeare specifically makes of his wife was to leave her his "second best bed." This is probably the most famous entry of any last will and testament. To bequeath such an item sounds totally ungenerous. It is, however, understood that it would have been Anne's right, through English Common Law, to one-third of William's estate as well as residence for life at New Place. So one of the most famous slap-on-the-face postmortem gifts, could actually not be that at all, and instead be a symbol of the love Anne and William Shakespeare shared.

Roseanna McCoy: Juliet of the Mountains

               Hers is the classic story of a girl who loved too much. Young and starry-eyed, she blinded herself to clan hatreds, and one spring afternoon, claimed Johnse Hatfield as her lover and intended husband. Little did she know how completely her happiness was doomed. Nor that she would become fuel in America's most famous, brutal feud. 


          First, there are the people ... Giants with fierce pride and strange names like Devil Anse. Cotton Top. Bad 'Lias. And "Squirrel Hunting" Sam. Men bred from the rugged individuals who scorned the courtesies and restrictions of their native, stifling Virginia society and chose to strike out for open spaces to the west, a wilderness where they could be free.

         The Hatfields and McCoys forgot the tensions and injustices of the Civil War. Again, the families intermarried. Even the patriarchs, with Ole Ran'l considerably older, added to their expansive families. In West Virginia, times were good. Devil Anse's logging enterprise prospered and his crew grew to 30 men. Through a lawsuit , he gained 5,000 acres along Grapevine Creek, turning him into one of Logan County's wealthiest men.

But near Kentucky's Blackberry Creek, the tide was about to turn.

           It happened one autumn day in 1878 when Ole Ran'l stopped to visit a Kentucky Hatfield, his wife's brother-in-law, Floyd. There Ran'l spotted a familiar-looking pig and claimed it as his own, accusing Floyd of theft. (Pigs in those days roamed free until herding time, marked only with an identifying ear notch.) Tempers flared and soon the two faced off in court. Ironically, Preacher Ans Hatfield, a hard-shell Baptist minister and justice of the peace, presided over the jury of six McCoys, six Hatfields and a courtroom littered with jugs and rifles.The final verdict rested on the testimony of Bill Staton, a nephew of Ole Ran'l and brother-in-law of Ellison Hatfield, who swore to Floyd Hatfield's ownership. Floyd won. But Staton was marked for death. Within months he found it at the hands of Paris and Sam McCoy. Though Sam was tried for the shooting in a Hatfield court, which writers believe Devil Anse had instructed to acquit for the sake of peace, the gesture was futile. The McCoys were enraged that Sam had stood trial at all. Instead of gratitude, they felt an even greater hatred for the Hatfield clan, and it would take little more for the seething frustrations to burst into all-out war.

Enter Romeo and Juliet

        Against this background of bubbling resentment, nothing could seem more foolhardy than a love affair between a daughter of Ole Ran'l and a son of Devil Anse.

But Roseanna McCoy was not wise.

By the best measure, the spring election of 1880 proved her downfall.

           To mountain folk, elections were great social events. Men came to swap goods and stories, to drink and laugh and doze in the sun. The women grabbed the chance to visit, gossip and show off their gingerbread, a token bribe to influence votes of their choice. All in all, elections were not to be missed.Johnse Hatfield understood that. Though only 18 and a West Virginia resident, he descended on Jerry Hatfield's Kentucky grounds that day dressed in his finest yellow shoes and new mail-order suit. A notorious lady's man whose looks set hearts aflutter, he had romance in mind.

Then he spied Roseanna.

      Soon Roseanna, considered one of Pike County's most beautiful girls, sauntered away into the nearby bushes with Johnse. The two returned hours later, when the sun was beginning to set and Roseanna realized her brother, Tolbert, had left for home without her.Panic-stricken and with fear in her eyes, she turned to her new lover.Johnse rose to the occasion, suggesting that she come home with him to the Hatfield cabin.

It seemed the only thing to do.

          Some say Devil Anse thought Johnse too young for marriage. Others swear he simply refused to have his own blood mixed with that of Randall McCoy. Whatever his reason, he turned deaf ears to Roseanna's pleading and when, months later, her mother sent her sisters to beg for her return, Roseanna went, in part, according to some historians, because of Johnse's wandering eye. But her stay with her own family, punctuated by Ole Ran'l's nagging and reproaches, was short-lived.In desperation, Roseanna fled to her aunt, Betty McCoy, at Stringtown, Ky., a spot closer to her lover and where the two could meet again with no prying brothers' eyes to disturb them.

But Roseanna had underestimated the male McCoys.

             One night, as the lovers rekindled the magic of their attraction, her kinsmen surrounded them, took Johnse prisoner and set out for the Pikeville jail. The alleged destination didn't fool Roseanna, who understood Johnse would be killed at the first convenient spot. In an act of sheer devotion and family disloyalty, Roseanna borrowed a neighbor's horse and rode, hat less, coat less and saddle less, to Devil Anse. Quickly gathering sons and neighbors, he led his forces over a shortcut, cut off the McCoys and reclaimed his son without a scratch.For her bravery, Roseanna received a cruel reward. From that day, Johnse never again risked returning to her side. Hopeless and pregnant, she went back to the father who considered her ride an unforgivable sin. There, amid hostility and shame, she contracted measles and miscarried her child.

To add to her heartbreak, Johnse married Roseanna's 16-year-old cousin, Nancy McCoy, only months later, on May 14, 1881.

           In little more than a year, the Hatfield-McCoy feud would burst into flames, perhaps not coincidentally at Jerry Hatfield's home during the 1882 election.There in the shadow of Roseanna's first blush of love, her brothers, Tolbert, Pharmer and Bud, would, without seeming provocation, stab Devil Anse's brother Ellison 26 times and finish him with a shot in the back. After his death three days later, the trio paid with their own lives, tied to bushes and riddled with bullets, despite their mother's cries for mercy.Soon after, when the Hatfields decided someone was leaking their plans, they turned on Nancy McCoy Hatfield's sister, Mary Elliott, bursting into her home and switching her and her daughter with a cow's tail. When her brother Jeff McCoy tried to seek revenge, he was arrested, escaped and quickly shot at the banks of the Tug.

Before the feud's end around 1891, the death toll numbered 13.

              To answer a legion of real and imagined wrongs from Ole Ran'l and with considerable influence from his political ally Perry Cline Ð the man who had lost 5,000 acres to Devil Anse so long before Ð Kentucky's governor appointed special officer Frank Phillips in 1887 to arrest the murderers of the McCoy brothers. To sweeten the pot, he also offered outlandish reward money that unleashed an army of bounty hunters on the West Virginia ridges.

         Determined to leave no living witnesses to convict them of their crime, the Hatfields raided the McCoy family home on New Year's Day 1888, killing daughter Alifair and son Calvin and burning the cabin to the ground.

           Suddenly public opinion shifted against the Hatfields, and Phillips began his work with glee and new names on his list, though he lacked properly executed extradition papers.

              In response, West Virginia's governor put up his own reward offers, sued his neighboring state for unlawful arrest of nine prisoners and eventually saw the case to the United States Supreme Court before the men were returned to Kentucky for sentences of death and prison terms.

But there was little joy at the verdicts.

             Roseanna herself was gone. After tending her mother's wounds from the New Year's Day raid, Roseanna grew more and more depressed, slipping away from life soon after. Less than 30 at her death, she lies today buried in Dils Cemetery at Pikeville.

         In a twist of fate, Johnse Mc-Coy, convicted separately and later than the others of feud crimes, was pardoned when he saved the life of Lt. Gov. William Pryor Thorne as the latter was attacked by an inmate during the officials prison inspection. Johnse's wife Nancy had long since left him, moved in with and, upon the pair's mutual divorces, eventually married his pursuer, Frank Phillips. She died at 36.The evil Jim Vance was killed in the feud. His young comrade, Cap Hatfield, went on to become an attorney and the father of Logan County's first woman lawyer.*

*Some information was gathered from an outside source